Using a Microscope, Scientists Resurrect a 123-year-old Recording

Using a Microscope, Scientists Resurrect a 123-year-old Recording


spacing is important
The recording’s grooves, seen through the microscope.

What’s the News: More than a century ago, Thomas Edison recorded a woman speaking the first verse of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on a metal cylinder for use in a talking doll. Now, scientists using microscopes to create 3D scans of the badly damaged cylinder have made it possible to hear her voice again, through the patina of years.

How the Heck:

  • The recording is encoded in a series of grooves carved by a stylus into a short cylinder or ring of metal, which was found in Thomas Edison’s West Orange, NJ, laboratory, now a museum. But the cylinder had grown so warped that it could not be played on any phonograph or similar device.
  • Using a confocal microscope, usually used by biologists for making detailed 3D images of cells and cellular structures, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scanned the cylinder to recording the meanderings of the grooves, whose slight variations in depth correspond to modulations in the voice of the speaker.
  • When they hooked their topographical map of the cylinder up to audio software, they heard, through the skips and scratches, the words of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
  • Listen to the recording for yourself

    cylinder
    The metal cylinder with the recording on it.

  • To date the recording, an audio historian dug through newspaper archives and found a series of references in 1888 to dolls sold by Thomas Edison that recited those very words. The New York Evening Sun includes a description of demonstration of the hand-cranked doll, which you can see a picture of here:

    “Then Mr. Edison wound up a brunette doll with jet black curls and sparkling brown eyes. This doll started off at a brisk rate with the following: ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are, Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky.’ … and she recited it with feeling and expression.”

What’s the Context:

The historian, Patrick Feaster of Indiana University, Bloomington, thinks that this might have been the first recording to have been sold commercially, an attempt by Edison to find a market for his phonograph technology and an early precursor to that new Beyonce album. There was no way to duplicate sound recordings yet, though, so he hired women to record each cylinder individually, in a kind of audio sweatshop. The Evening Sun describes the set-up:,,,..........